Rappers' Brain in Flow: Scientists Find How their Brain Thinks Creatively
A recent study on freestyle rappers aimed at shedding more light on to how the brain thinks creatively, found that their brains work in a similar way athletes' brains do by shutting down parts of the organ that may interfere with their creative flow.
Scientists found that freestyle rappers use the regions of the brain that are in charge of organizing and integrating information, while the regions of the brain in charge of self-control, self-monitoring and self-censoring are less active.
"If an athlete starts paying attention to what they're doing, how they are going to move their body to catch a ball, they'll clutch and they won't do it," study researcher Allen Braun told LiveScience. The study was made by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), a part of the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers also found that language and motor regions of the brain were also active when they were making rhymes. They found that when the rappers wrapped up a rhyme, the attentional areas of the brain were also active, indicating that finishing a verse requires more control and attention.
The rappers with the best creative use of language also showed more activity in the portion of the brain that is linked to mental lexicon or vocabulary which is located behind the ear, according to LiveScience.
Scientists at the NIDCD invited 12 male rappers to sing rhymes while attached to a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. They gave them eight-measure tracks and a set of lyrics to memorize. After they rapped the lyrics attached to the MRI scanner they were given the same eight-measure tracks and asked to freestyle.
"They talked a lot about their environment, about how they are in the scanner," study researcher Siyuan Liu, a scientist at the NIDCD told LiveScience. "Or sometimes they talked about their careers, like how many albums they'd published."
Regardless of the subject, the rappers' brain activity was different when they had to memorize compared to when they had to do freestyle.
At this point scientists can't tell if the brain can be trained to think faster but after the study, they know that creativity is noting extraordinary.
"These are just simple rearrangements of brain activity and cognitive processes that are a normal part of everyday experiences," Braun told LiveScience.
his research was first reported in Mid-November as part of Live Science's "Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds" series. The network's series describe the thought processes that contributed to the success of masterminds like Mozart, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, among many others.
